Science Fiction Studies

#3 = Volume 1, No. 3 = Spring 1974

John Huntington

The Unity of Childhood's
End

Childhood's End is a novel which on one level may be merely an exercise
in satisfying a special market but on another engages ideas of deep concern to
the author himself. Quite aside from its frequently banal slickness, the novel
renders with clarity and completeness an idea of the nature and importance of
progress that lies at the center of Clarke's imagination. But an idea alone does
not create successful art. In Childhood's End Clarke succeeds in a way he
does not in any of his other novels, for, though he develops versions of the
same myth of progress in other works, only in Childhood's End does he
overcome the myth's intrinsic duality and create a unified work which does
justice to the complexity of the issue by expressing the exhilaration of
progress and at the same time giving full recognition to the limits of mere
human aspiration and to the tragic sacrifice involved in transcending the human.
The serious myth behind Childhood's End gives the novel weight, but it is
in its shaping of that myth that the novel stands out as a special work of art.

Clarke's myth of progress consists of two stages: that of rational,
technological progress, and that of transcendent evolution.1 Many of
his novels remain on the first stage and render technological speculations in
painstaking detail. As his numerous non-fictional essays on the future attest,
Clarke finds such speculation satisfying in itself, and ideologically he seems
to have complete faith that an efficient technology will produce a better
future. But in his most far-reaching novels technological progress fails to
satisfy, and mankind advances, not by inventing more competent machinery, but by
mutating into a higher form of being. This transcendental vision offers, not the
detailed ingenuity of mechanical invention, but powerful hints of modes of
understanding and perception and of mental powers and controls that so
completely surpass those which we ourselves experience that they are
incomprehensible to us. Such a realm of being can only be hinted at; it needs a
language of symbol and suggestion in place of the technological vision's
concrete detail. Whereas the latter offers the excitement of comprehension, the
former, offers the excitement of obscurity.

In Clarke's myth the transcendent state is not simply the highest stage of
technological progress. Though there exists a sequential relation between the
two worlds—the transcendent always follows the technological—there is no
structural similarity which would allow for communication between them. The
transcendent world represents a completely different order of being and
perception, an order which, instead of subsuming the technology that has
preceded it, obliterates it. The model for the relation of the two visions is
that of the Pauline promise that forms the basis for Childhood's End:
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought
as a child: but when I became a man I put away childish things. For now we see
through a glass darkly; but then face to face."2 Just as the
mature man "put away childish things," transcendent consciousness
completely dispenses with the attainments of rational science and the inventions
of technology. The children, having entered the Overmind at the end of Childhood's
End, destroy the Earth. This higher state is thus very different from that
of the Platonic seer who, after he has escaped the cave and seen the sun, is
still able to return—is even obliged to return—to his benighted fellows and
to communicate his insight as best he can given the limits of language and the
prejudices of his hearers. In Clarke's scheme no such communication is possible
between the two states of insight; they represent steps in an evolutionary
progress, but they have nothing structurally in common.

There is also an important difference between normal technological progress
and the kind of evolutionary leap that leads to the transcendent vision. Clarke
repeatedly describes the elevation from normal human reason and perception (i.e.
the technological state) to the transcendent state as generated, not by the
powers inherent in man, though without those powers nothing is possible, nor by
man's own achievements, but by a genetic transformation in man caused by the
interference of some higher being. The leap from human to Overmind is achieved
by grace, not by man's own works. We see the basic pattern in 2001: A Space
Odyssey when higher being by impressing a vision in one ape's mind changes
his brain's structure and makes him a man (§3). Clarke implies that the
laborious process of natural selection is insufficient for true progress, that
any progress an ape or a man achieves on his own merely earns the privilege of
attaining higher states and does not actually lead to that higher state.

The gratuitous nature of transcendence and the fact that it always follows
the technological state leave man no choice but to pursue the technological
vision,3 but with the important awareness that technological progress
is not true progress, merely a test of man's moral and intellectual energies. As
we shall see, technological progress alone leads to a dead end. True progress
comes only as a kind of reward infused by the Overmind into man's history. At
the end of "The Sentinel," the story that forms the basis for 2001,
this is made explicit: higher beings, the narrator tells us, would not be
"concerned with races still struggling up from savagery. They would be
interested in our civilization only if we proved our fitness to survive—by
crossing space and so escaping from the Earth, our cradle.4
Technology does not itself lead anywhere important; it merely proves "our
fitness to survive." Thus, at the end of 2001, when Bowman reaches
Saturn, he simply leaves behind the fancy machines that have occupied his and
our attention for the major part of the novel. He doesn't need them.

This myth of progress functions as a given in Clarke's work. While we may
object to the myth as an interpretation of actual reality, it is part of the
fictional reality that we accept when we begin reading and agree to suspend
disbelief. It seems to me, therefore, that the myth itself lies beyond criticism
insofar as we are interested in the artistic pattern of the novel as opposed to
its ideology.

2001: A Space Odyssey eloquently renders Clarke's basic myth of
progress, but it does not make it clear why, if technological progress itself
delights him as much as it seems to, Clarke should find the transcendent stage
necessary. In that novel we experience the myth without any sense of what its
absence might entail. In an earlier novel, The City and the Stars, Clarke
explores more explicitly the insufficiency of technological progress alone, and,
though the novel itself stumbles around a lot, its failure to create a coherent
myth illuminates, perhaps better than a more successful work might, Clarke's
need for a mythology that will value technology without limiting itself to it.

Clarke begins The City and the Stars by imagining technological
perfection, the eternal, self-sufficient city of Diaspar, which caters to all
its citizens, creates every imagined pleasure, and in which men do not die but
merely return to the "memory banks" of the "Central
Computer" for a few thousand years to be reissued from the "Hall of
Creation" full grown and capable of remembering all their past existences.
On one level Clarke seems to admire this technological marvel in which the
various sciences have worked together to create a world in which everybody—except
Alvin, the adolescent hero of the novel—is happy. But, if Clarke can admire
Diaspar as an engineering feat, he finds it morally repulsive. He accuses its
inhabitants of being "sick" and "insane." We are told that
Diaspar represents a "cowardly" "fear" of the unknown. It is
man's retreat from "reality." The problem with Diaspar is that the
activities that went into the utopia's creation, the scientific experiments and
the intellectual daring, have been rendered useless by the city's success.
Diaspar, in depriving man of "that spark of curiosity that was once Man's
greatest gift" (§7), represents a paradox that is inherent in the very
notion of technological progress: the more successful such progress is, the less
need will there be for more of it. The very activity that proves man's
"fitness to survive," as it achieves its perfection, undermines that
fitness.5 Let me make it clear that Clarke does not condemn Diaspar
because it is totalitarian. The theme of the perfection of machinery leading to
some kind of political repression is a common one in science fiction, but what
is curious here in terms of the tradition is that Clarke does not attribute any
such tyranny to this machine. The Central Computer of Diaspar is much less
totalitarian in its enforcement of its own idea of order than is the machine in
Forster's "The Machine Stops" or the "Well-Doer" in
Zamiatin's We. The computer never obstructs Alvin; when he learns to use
it it even aids him. Thus the usual political objection to such a utopia seems
irrelevant here.

Nor is the problem Clarke envisions a result of any kind of misfunction of
the machine. Forster's machine stops, but the Central Computer of Diaspar seems
truly eternal. Some years before Clarke invented Diaspar, John W. Campbell had
created situations roughly like Clarke's but with two important and illuminating
differences. First, Campbell's stories make it clear in a way that Clarke's
never does that the very survival of the race is in danger. Second, Campbell
solves the problem simply by improving the machine.6 For Clarke,
however, the problem is not so easily described or solved. There is no flaw to
technological perfection here which needs correction; it is technological
perfection itself that is objectionable.

Clarke does not claim, however, that all technological progress necessarily
leads to such a paradox. At the end of The City and the Stars he places
the blame for Diaspar's failure on the shortsighted cowardice of that
conservative element of mankind which, when millions of years ago the chance was
offered man to leave the galaxy in the company of some incomprehensibly
transcendent being, refused to go and tried to protect themselves from higher
realities by building Diaspar. Finally, therefore, the bind of perfection
derives, not simply from the nature of technological progress itself, but from
the conscious plan of the founders and their fear of transcendence. Technology
is a trap only when it tries to preclude higher realities. In 2001 and Childhood's
End man's transcendent metamorphosis restores the openness that the
technological perfection of Diaspar obviates. In The City and the Stars, however,
transcendent possibilities are treated more ambivalently, for though they are
clearly outlined, they are finally envisioned as totally alien and
incomprehensible: "To Alvin, the thoughts of Vanamonde were as meaningless
as a thousand voices shouting together in some vast, echoing cave" (§24).
At the end of the novel Alvin, weary of the stars, turns aside from seeking
transcendent being in favor of the more modest task of restoring the Earth, now
a desert, to fertility.

"No; I want nothing more of space. Even if any other civilizations
still survive in this Galaxy, I doubt if they will be worth the effort of
finding. There is so much to do here; I know now that this is my home, and I
am not going to leave it again."

He looked down at the great deserts, but his eyes saw instead the waters
that would be sweeping over them a thousand years from now. Man had
rediscovered his world, and he would make it beautiful while he remained
upon it. And after that—

"We aren't ready to go out to the stars...... (§26)7

The higher forms of progress are now open in a way they never were so long as
Diaspar was a success, but they are not conceived of as really possible objects
for contemplation yet, and the novel fans back on a version of the technological
vision.

The disjunction that exists between the two stages of progress raises a
serious aesthetic problem, for, since there is no structural connection between
the two stages, any novel that tries to encompass both will probably find itself
falling into two distinct and unconnected parts. In The City and theStars
Clarke tries to avoid this artistic problem by having Alvin decline the
transcendent level and remain on the technological level while the potential for
transcendent progress is left open. The effect, however, of going back to the
beginning and starting again, whatever may be said for such humility in real
life, is partly to render irrelevant the space travel and the search for higher
being that have gone before. Ironically, a somewhat similar criticism holds for 2001
where the successful shift into the transcendent vision, in effect, junks the
technological vision that has occupied us for most of the novel. Just as from
Alvin's point of view Vanamonde is incomprehensible, from the perspective of the
Star-Child at the end of 2001, technology is merely trivial.8 We can
see the rationale for the shift from one stage to the other, but neither novel
offers a satisfactory artistic rendition of the myth.

Childhood's End, while by using the two-stage myth of progress it
satisfies the demands of progress and avoids the frustrations of attainment,
escapes the disabling dichotomy of structure of 2001 by introducing a
middle term which joins the two states of vision. In Childhood's End the
transcendent evolutionary leap both opens new prospects and, importantly,
conserves past achievement; the final destruction of the Earth, while it calls
up tragic emotions, also represents a continuation of the human spirit.

The plot element in Childhood's End that importantly distinguishes it
from 2001 is the presence of the Overlords.9 They function as
both a prospect of the possibilities of technology and as figures of tragic
limitation, and in doing so they mediate between the two stages of progress. At
the beginning of the novel they represent an advanced technology, admirably
rational, a model for mankind, a goal for progress. By the end of the novel we
discover that they represent the dead end of technological progress, and they
become admirable mainly for their refusal to succumb to despair. While we can
admire their superior science and morality at the start, we can admire their
stoicism at the end.

The Overlords are masterful themselves, and yet they are mere servants of the
Overmind. This servitude of Titans raises some difficult problems. A parallel
with Satan, suggested by the situation itself, is underlined in the novel by the
physical appearance of the Overlords10 and may at first make us pause
and seek for darker purposes in their seemingly benevolent actions. But the
Overlords, unlike Satan, for all their frustration with being limited to a
technological state, and for all their envy of the mysterious heights of
transcendence, ultimately acquiesce to their fate:

For all their achievements, thought Karellen, for all their mastery of
the physical universe, his people were no better than a tribe that had
passed its whole existence upon some flat and dusty plain. Far off were the
mountains, where power and beauty dwelt, where the thunder sported above the
glaciers and the air was clear and keen. There the sun still walked,
transfiguring the peaks with glory, when all the land below was wrapped in
darkness. And they could only watch and wonder; they could never scale those
heights.

Yet, Karellen knew, they would hold fast until the end: they would await
without despair whatever destiny was theirs. They would serve the Overmind
because they had no choice, but even in that service they would not lose
their souls. (§24)

Though both Devils and Overlords are denied Heaven, in place of Satan's vow
of everlasting war, his heroic non serviam, the Overlords assert a spirit
of stoic resignation. They understand the Overmind enough to acknowledge the
futility of rebellion. Ducunt Fata volentem, nolentem trahunt.12
Like Stormgren who in the first section of the novel, in spite of doubts,
submits to the overwhelming power of the Overlords, they submit to the Overmind.

The basic structure of Childhood's End can be represented by an
equation: Humans/Overlords = Overlords/Overmind. Whereas the first two sections
of the novel develop the Human/Overlord relation, the last section develops the
Overlord/Overmind relation. When the Russian rocket scientist, Schneider, first
sees the ships of the Overlords, "for the first time in his life he knew
despair" (§1). We discover that this same despair in the face of the
unattainable is what the Overlords themselves have to fight. But the novel as a
whole does not preach despair because, while it repeats the initial situation on
a higher plane, it also performs the miraculous transformation of human into
Overmind so that the first and the last terms of the proportion are seen as
spiritually the same. The Ovemind is both a mysterious transcendence and an
expression of qualities potential in mankind.

The important point is that logically Clarke is having it two ways here. If
human and Overlord are not equal, then human and Overmind cannot be equal; and
yet they are. The Overmind, thus, represents both progress and stasis. While on
the one hand we are moving higher and higher, from man through Overlord to
Overmind, on the other we are also returning to the same level. The Overmind
here represents a kind of magical solution to the problem we discover at the end
of The City and the Stars. In that novel the transcendent being,
Vanamonde,12 is a creation of man, but because he is seen as
something completely other than man Alvin loses interest in him. In Childhood's
End it is as if Alvin had made the effort to accept and become Vanamonde
with all the denial of human concern that such an act entails.

What in the basic structure of the novel constitutes a logical inconsistency
generates an artistic whole, and this unity is mirrored and supported by the
smaller details of imagery and character. My purpose here is not to interpret in
detail these lesser structures, but simply to suggest a line of analysis which,
if developed fully, would reveal that the novel resolves logical inconsistency
on many levels, not merely on the level of the large structure with which we
have been concerned. Throughout the novel, for example, images of destruction
are associated with progress: just as the Overmind destroys earth, so too the
rocket "Columbus," at the beginning of the novel, will, in achieving
its breakthrough into space, destroy the atoll from which it is launched. The
volcano of the novel's opening line recurs as the presence of the Overmind on
the Overlord's planet, and in their communal suicide the New Athens people
imitate the volcano. It is thus thematically important that man's potential for
self-destruction should be the mark of his potential for transcendence. The
Overlords, who arrive to prevent the former, due to their complete rational
competence, are denied the latter. The question whether chaotic self-destruction
and creative progress are so related in actual fact does not really apply here;
we are concerned at this point, not with thematic truth, but with thematic
pattern. The images of the novel engage contradictory ideas and repeatedly unify
them.

The major human characters in Childhood's End share the Overlords'
doubleness, but because they fail to generate the unified response that would
allow us simply to accept them, they make us aware of the inadequacy of our
conventional solutions to the problems the novel raises. Stormgren seems a wise
man, and yet at times one is made to wonder whether he is not simply a quisling.13
On the other hand Wainwright is a religious fanatic and, in part, an object of
satire, but at the same time, as an advocate of independence, he is a spokesman
for attitudes close to Clarke's own as expressed elsewhere. The humans engage
the same issues we see in the situation of the Overlords, but when put in purely
human terms these issues become irresolvably ambiguous. The Overlords, perhaps
because their intellectual and moral superiority seems to lift them above the
dichotomies that torture Stormgren and Wainwright, do not generate ambivalence.
The Overlords mediate between rival positions of independence and service and
reconcile the dilemmas that we experience when faced with the human figures.

Similarly, the paradox that the magical structure of the whole novel resolves
appears as a problem, another source of ambivalence, in the middle sections of
the novel. Before the existence of the Overmind has been revealed and before the
midwife function of the Overlords is apparent, Clarke makes us puzzle through
some of the conventional solutions to the problems of technological progress. In
essence, he offers us two possible, but unsatisfactory, solutions to the
challenge of the boredom of perfection. One, the New Athens Community, attempts
to reinvigorate the creative activities that have constituted man's glories in
the past by retreating from the smooth-functioning and technologically
sophisticated world run by the Overlords and setting up a consciously primitive
society. The other possible solution is embodied in Jan Rodricks, an Alvin-like
character who, frustrated with a world without adventure, sets out to explore
despite the prohibitions of the Overlords.

The idea behind New Athens is to preserve the spirit of humanity by a kind of
artificial primitivism and an artistic focus. Clarke's ambivalent attitude
towards this attempt is revealed in a small joke he makes when George and Jean,
the young couple we watch throughout this section, arrive in the colony. Jean
wonders whether she will be able to stand cooking in a kitchen after a life of
being able to dial "Food Central" and getting her order five minutes
later (§15). The joke here is an easy one, but like many jokes it conceals an
uneasiness, an ambiguous attitude, on its maker's part. On the one hand, by
expressing contempt for the pampered future which judges what we consider luxury
a curse, the joke implies that the technology of the future has been not only
frivolous in creating such worksavers as "Food Central," but has
actually weakened man's ability to face even the most trivial hardship. At its
center the joke engages an important theme that we have looked at already in The
City and the Stars: that technology, insofar as it creates luxury, beguiles
man of his basic moral fiber and leads him to avoid struggle, risk, and
adventure. Like Marie Antoinette dressing up as a shepherdess, the technological
aristocrat needs to get away from his ease and back to some real, human
identity. But the other side of the joke ridicules this whole attempt at
recovery of the primitive integrity. Just as Marie Antoinette's pastoralism is
ultimately a sentimental escape from reality, so the self-conscious primitivism
of technologically sophisticated people is false. The New Athens attempt to get
back to nature is here revealed to be, in part, a denial of technological
reality, a kind of sentimental and reactionary pastoralism. The joke about
Jean's kitchen holds together diametrically opposed insights into the
debilitating effect of technological progress and the liberating possibilities
of it.

The other human escape from utopia is viewed less ambivalently than the New
Athens experiment, but it too has a futile resolution. Jan Rodricks, like Alvin
in The City and the Stars, frustrated by the limits put on his curiosity
by the Golden Age imposed by the Overlords, breaks free to explore other worlds.
His heroic and brash act obviously has the author's sympathies, but it leads to
tragic isolation, not to renewal, for Jan returns to an Earth completely empty
of human beings. The whole episode would seem merely a nostalgic excrescence to
the main theme of the novel were it not that at the end Jan offers us a human
perspective for the final metamorphosis and thereby powerfully brings to bear
the awareness of loss that man's triumphant progress into higher being entails.
The annihilation of mankind in the form we know it, a catastrophe which at the
end of 2001 Clarke dismisses as an ominous and conventional joke, is here
given a more considered weight by the presence of a human figure who finds value
in the technological vision and who devotes himself to exploring the unknown.
Jan gives us a scale by which we can measure the sacrifice transcendence
involves.

Pastoral retreat and individual daring both fail to resolve the dilemma of
progress. While the inquiry into their potentials sheds light on the problem and
gives urgency to the issue, it takes the transcendent stage to save the human
energy that leads to progress from futilely wasting itself. And, then, it takes
in addition the magical agency of the plot to create an image and a situation
which, while recognizing their incompatibility, can unify the two stages of
technology and transcendence. The Overmind, which conserves the human spirit as
it destroys it, and the Overlords, who are both masters and servants, combine to
render a complex paradox which expresses our hopes for progress as well as our
doubts about it. That the literary solution Clarke has arrived at should be so
profoundly paradoxical need not alarm us; it is, after all, a commonplace of
literary criticism that paradox of sorts works at the center of much literature,
and the disciplines of psychology and anthropology, to say nothing of
philosophy, have repeatedly shown us how often imaginative fictions, whether
they be dreams, primitive myths, poems, or stories, accept and resolve the
contradictions experienced in life. The first question that has to be asked of
the artist is not, have you appealed to contradictory truths but have you
created a pattern of meaning that is coherent in itself ?

That we can view the basic structure of the novel as coherent and can
perceive how other elements of the novel may support that coherence does not
mean that Childhood's End is without faults. As Samuelson well notes, the
banal style of the novel is not adequate to the theme. The characters, while one
doesn't expect fine detail in their portraits since the main concern of the
novel is with larger issues of progress, are alternately pretentious and
trivial. One might argue that the frivolousness of much of the middle section of
the novel is intended as an ironic foil to emphasize the gap between human and Overmind, but, even if that is the intention, the device remains clumsy and
distracting. Most important, as a presence the Overmind, inevitably, frustrates.
We can have only vague hints of value and power; we can know it only by its
consequences. But, given the coherence of the novel's large structure, these
specific complaints diminish in importance. Childhood's End, whatever
detailed faults we find, seems to succeed at the end. Though after numerous
readings, as I can attest, the basic structure may no longer surprise and
delight and the flaws may begin to distract, the conclusion of the novel still
brings together in a powerful way the thematic threads and solves the problems
that, however mechanically and clumsily, Clarke has raised. None of his other
novels succeeds so well.

NOTES

1David N. Samuelson in his article "Clarke's Childhood's
End: A Median Stage of Adolescence?" SFS 1(1973):4-17, uses the word mystic
to describe this state. I prefer the term transcendent because it seems
less prone to misinterpretation as being opposed to reason. The transcendent
state is not irrational; it is superrational. The distinction is important.

2The language of the Pauline text is echoed early
in Childhoods End, though the radical implications of "maturity" are not
at that point understood: "'What does anyone
know of Karellen's powers?' retorted Stormgren. 'When I was a boy, the
Federation of Europe was a dream—but when I grew to manhood it had become
reality. And that was before the arrival of the Overlords. Karellen is merely
finishing the work we had begun'" (§2).

3Samuelson argues that in Childhood's End
"the reader is almost forced to make a choice between two positions,"
that of the "scientifically oriented" "Devil's party" and
that of the "mystically-oriented" Overmind-God (p9). In fact, though
one can contemplate the two modes of cognition, there is little room for choice
here. According to Clarke's myth, we have no choice but to follow reason and
science, for only by holding on to reason now can we hope to transcend it in the
future.

4The story appeared first in 1951 and is reprinted
in Clarke's collection Expedition to Earth (1953).

5The theme is not at all new to science fiction.
Wells's Time Traveler, meditating on his first experiences in the future,
postulates that the decadence of the Eloi results from technological success.
"We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity" (The
Time Machine, §4/§6).

6In "Twilight" (1934) a time traveller
simply reprograms the machine to generate curiosity. In "The Story of the
Machine" (1935) the machine is so wise that when it sees that man has
become overly dependent on it, it simply turns itself off.

7The City and the Stars varies the basic
myth we have traced by suggesting that perhaps man may be able to attain some
form of transcendence on his own. Vanamonde, the childish supermind, is a human
creation. Also, at the end of the novel Alvin sends his space ship, piloted by
the robot, out beyond the galaxy: "One day our cousins will receive my
message and they'll know that we are waiting for them here on Earth. They will
return, and I hope by then we will be worthy of them, however great they have
become" (§26). Though the concern for worthiness echoes the concern for
fitness at the end of "The Sentinel," the situation is importantly
different. First of all we initiate the signal and invite them to find us.
Second, it's a kind of by-your-own-bootstrap theory of evolution, for the
superior race who will elevate us if we are worthy is a branch of the human
tree, our "cousins."

8At the very end of 2001 Clarke reverts to
one of the oldest clichés of science fiction: the vague threat of awful things
to come. If we take the threat seriously we must conclude that the novel
constitutes a warning against engaging in the kinds of scientific activities and
explorations that will lead ultimately to transcendence. Since such a moral
seems highly unlikely given Clarke's ideology, and since nothing else in the
novel supports such a reading, one suspects that the end of 2001 merely
signifies a turning away from the real issues that the novel might raise. Not
only does the novel end up trivializing technology, it trivializes transcendence
too.

9Hal, the computer for the Jupiter probe in 2001,
might be seen as structurally similar to the Overlords, but though Hal is
technologically marvelous, he merely parodies the humanitas that allows
the Overlords to unify Childhood's End.

10Samuelson (p7) notes other parallels, among them
the similarity between the Overlords' home planet and Hell.

12Vanamonde is a high form of being, but The
City and the Stars posits the presence of much higher beings so that, on the
scale we are used to from 2001 and Childhood's End, Vanamonde is
quite a modest level of transcendence.

13The issue is raised obliquely in chapter three
when Stormgren ponders whether in supporting the Overlords he isn't acting like
an Indian tolerating British control and thereby destroying his own culture.

ABSTRACT

Despite its frequently banal slickness, Childhoods End
renders with clarity and completeness a contradictory myth of progress that lies at the
center of Clarkes imagination. Though Clarke develops versions of this myth of
progress in other works (including The City and The Stars and 2001: A Space
Odyssey), only in Childhoods End does he overcome the myths
intrinsic duality and create a unified work that expresses the exhilaration of progress
while recognizing the limits of mere human aspiration and the tragic sacrifice involved in
transcending the human. The serious myth behind Childhoods End gives the
novel weight, but it is in its unified shaping of that myth that the novel stands out as a
special work of art. Clarkes myth of progress consists of two stages: rational,
technological progress and transcendent evolution. Many of his novels dwell on the first
stage, rendering technological speculations in painstaking detail. But in his most
far-reaching novels, and most especially in Childhoods End, technological
progress fails to satisfy, and mankind advances not by inventing more competent machinery
but by mutating into a higher form of being. Such a realm of being can only be hinted at;
it needs a language of symbol and suggestion in place of the technological visions
concrete detail.